AMD Instinct MI210 computing card appeared
At the end of October 2020, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced that it has won an order worth $160 million to build a supercomputer called LUMI in Finland to support scientific research in ten European countries. LUMI is based on an AMD EPYC processor and Instinct computing card. The theoretical peak value will exceed the Fugaku supercomputer system, which was previously ranked first in the world, reaching 0.55 ExaFLOPS.
Recently, an engineer involved in the construction of LUMI’s supercomputer tweeted that AMD has begun shipping Instinct MI210 computing cards for high-performance computing (HPC). You must know that AMD has not officially confirmed this product, nor has it disclosed specific specifications.
According to the engineer from the Finnish CSC-IT Science Center, the Instinct MI210 computing card is a PCIe expansion card form, adopts the CDNA 2 architecture, has 104 CUs, that is, 6656 stream processors, and is equipped with 64GB of HBM2e video memory. The Instinct MI210 computing card looks different from the Instinct MI250X previously released by AMD. It does not use the MCM multi-chip package. There should be only one computing module chip.
Due to the lack of specific data, the performance of the Instinct MI210 computing card cannot be completely determined. If you refer to the previous Instinct MI250/MI250X computing card, which is also the CDNA 2 architecture, the Instinct MI210 should be stronger than AMD’s previous Instinct MI100, and it is likely to be stronger than the Nvidia A100 PCIe computing card. Perhaps AMD will announce the relevant data of the Instinct MI210 computing card after the LUMI supercomputer project is officially completed.
According to the timetable of the LUMI supercomputer, the second phase of the construction plan will be completed within the fourth quarter of 2021.
